Couple's marriage easily blends two cultures

Ann Marie and Murth Murthy will celebrate 47 years of marriage this November. The couple has easily blended their different backgrounds during the course of their relationship.
(
LEWIS GEYER
)

LONGMONT -- During the couple's first few dates, Ann Marie Murth lapped up stories from the exotic Indian man with "big, dark eyes."

"He was just the most fascinating person to listen to," she recalled. "I had never met someone like him."

The love story between a third-generation Italian Catholic woman and an Indian immigrant from a prominent orthodox Hindu family has had surprisingly few bumps along the road.

"Our marriage is unique in that we had no big cultural clashes. We just melded and blended," said Ann Marie, 69. "We're comfortable with each other."

Ann Marie met Nanjundiah "Murth" Murthy while the couple worked for an international think tank for American Machine and Foundry in Stanford, Conn.

At 27, Murth came to the U.S. to work on a master's degree in electronics. He'd attended British schools, so Western living was a smooth transition, he said.

Less than a year after the couple began dating, Murth returned to Bangalore, India, to celebrate his father's 60th birthday, and, as it turns out, to meet the pretty Indian woman his father expected his son to marry.

The girlfriend back in the U.S. wasn't mentioned.

"I was very practical about it because they wouldn't understand and there was no point in telling them," said Murth, 80.

Back at home, Ann Marie tried to remain noncommittal about the relationship, cautious about getting too attached to a man she feared might decide to remain in India. When Murth took an early flight home, she arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport to pick him up and watched him pass through customs before they greeted one another.

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"Then he puts down his suitcase and said, 'Will you marry me?'" she remembered. "And I said, 'Yes.'"

Then Murth wrote a letter to his parents, telling them that, "By the time you get this, we'll be married." He included a black-and-white photograph of Ann Marie, dressed in a pale blue sari and bearing a bindi dot on her forehead.

While his more open-minded mother and grandmother were in favor of the union, Murth said his father was upset. They reconciled 15 years later, when Murth and his wife returned to his hometown for his niece's wedding.

Parental approval aside, the couple meshed their cultures fairly successfully. Together, they raised their three children -- Shalini Schane, Mark Murthy and Asha MacDonald -- in Redding, Conn., where Murth retired as vice president chief of engineering for Pitney Bowes. Ann Marie was a stay-at-home mother turned administrative assistant in General Electric Co.'s information technology. The couple moved to Longmont 10 years ago to be closer to family.

They will celebrate their 47th wedding anniversary on Nov. 8, and that easy companionship is still there.

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